AMP Roadmap Update for Q2

We’ve updated the AMP Roadmap with our new projects and progress on existing priorities. Specifically we are focusing on format, analytics and ads improvements. Highlights from these areas below.

Format

We’re doubling down on e-commerce, engagement, and developer tools this quarter, with big features in all three targeting completion by the end of June.

amp-bind, a flexible event binding system supporting more interactivity in AMP, is now available via origin trials, and targeting launch later this quarter. A recent addition to amp-bind is the ability to bind to amp-list’s src parameter. This opens up a wide range of functionality, including in-place sorting, filtering, pagination, and search results pulled in from an arbitrary server without re-loading or navigating the page. In addition, we’re implementing a method to support client-side sorting and filtering. These, along with two in-progress features, asynchronous form validation and form input autocompletion, should make it a lot easier to build robust e-commerce pages in AMP.

Finally, we’re building a handful of new templates for AMP Start to help developers in more verticals quickly make great-looking AMPs. To help customize the templates on the site, we’re also making it easier to configure AMP Start pages without having to edit code directly by developing an AMP Start configurator.

Analytics

Several recent improvements have extended amp-analytics capabilities, particularly to support requirements for AMP ads. Tracking element visibility is now more flexible with the introduction of a waitFor property that can be specified alongside other visibility trigger parameters. We also plan on adding support to specify when visibility data should be reported (tentatively called “reportWhen”), which is useful for totals information (data that’s accumulated throughout the page lifecycle and reported just once).

We’ve introduced a mechanism to support varying the Client ID depending on viewing context. This has been employed as part of an announced change in Google Analytics — launching soon — that will bring consistency to how users are counted across AMP and non-AMP pages served from a publisher’s domain. It is available for other analytics vendors to use as well.

During the rest of the quarter, we will focus on launching support for AMP extensions to collect data using amp-analytics. We will also work on adding filter support to transform AMP variables prior to their being sent as part of analytics hit requests.

Ads

This quarter, we are focused on improving UX behaviors of existing ads, adding more options to improve monetization, and continue focus on supporting the ability to serve AMP ads using DoubleClick for Publishers.

We listened to your feedback that the current default ad placeholder was more conspicuous than we’d like it to be. We experimented with a few different options and settled on one that is more subtle than the previous version, which will roll out soon. We are also looking into optimizing how we load non-AMP ads served to AMP pages to help minimize the time a user sees the ad placeholder.

We are always working on ways to improve publisher monetization. Next month, we expect to launch the amp-ima-video component to allow serving pre-roll ads via the IMA SDK in the built-in browser video player. When a user dwells on the page for awhile, it can make sense to swap out an ad for another. We are working on a feature to auto refresh ads after a minimum interval to allow publishers to monetize more ads for the same number of pages.

The DoubleClick team is working on correlating ad requests on a single page to allow publishers to run ads that require competitive exclusions and roadblocks. The DoubleClick formats team is also working on the ability to deliver AMP creatives using the custom creatives type, which is expected to launch by July.

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Thanks to the AMP development community for your work and feedback. As always, please let us know if you have any issues or feature requests.